Some Savannah middle school students aren’t even teenagers yet, but they’re already married with children, jobs, and bills. While that may sound impossible, it’s all part of the JA Discovery Center, which is housed on Georgia Southern University’s Armstrong Campus.
Yesterday, nearly 30 local educators, school representatives, business leaders, and nonprofit directors traveled from Evans to Savannah to tour the city’s JA Discovery Center, which offers programs for sixth, seventh and eighth-grade students.
As part of the tour, they were able to observe students participating in JA Finance Park, which tasks students with creating budgets and learning to stick to those budgets while visiting the center’s storefronts, including Publix and Enmarket. These students are also assigned scenarios. Some are married with children, while others are single parents.
Chris Willox, a financial advisor with Highland Trust Partners in Augusta, was excited to tour the center and watch students working together.
“Spreading financial literacy has always been a passion of mine, and to see the experiential learning environment in action was truly amazing,” Willox said. “Most agree it’s a very important topic, but unfortunately, it’s not a very exciting topic; making it fun for middle school students, as Junior Achievement does, is definitely the way to create financially literate citizens.”
“JA’s new venture sounds wonderful,” said Laurie Cook, who was the Executive Director for Junior Achievement in Augusta for more than six years, before the Atlanta Headquarters absorbed the Augusta Market around 2015.
“We really grew the program, but it was more school-based. When I arrived, JA had moved away from their after-school Company model for the “in-school” model that we used. Now, it appears they have gone to an experience/immersion model,” she said.
Cook said she enlisted volunteers from area businesses to go in and teach financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and various economics classes for grades kindergarten through middle school, primarily in Columbia and Richmond counties.
“We arranged for job shadowing events at local businesses for high school students as well. Our largest number of students job shadowing in one day was 700 students.
During the last two years of my tenure, we partnered with Augusta University to host a summer camp called BIZ U for aspiring entrepreneurs during which the Hall of Fame laureates would present to the students and answer questions.”
ABD Publisher, Neil Gordon produced video tributes for Hall of Fame laureates Cook and her Board of Directors selected for induction into the annual CSRA Hall of Fame at an annual banquet. Business leaders inducted included Augusta automotive legend, Ann Taylor, members of the Knox family, former RW Allen CEO and current Congressman, Rick Allen, bankers Pat and Pierce Blanchard, Windsor Jewelers founder, Donnie Thompson and many others including commercial developer Jim Hull, who’s named adorns the Business school at Augusta University.
McKnight Construction Company will build Augusta’s JA Discovery Center. The company’s Vice President of Operations, Joe Kinsey, who also toured the Savannah Center, said construction is expected to begin this spring and is scheduled to be completed this year. But Kinsey isn’t sure if the center will be ready for students by the time fall classes start for CSRA students.
“We’re still so early in the process; we don’t have the exact dates yet,” he said.
